Friday, August 11, 2017

Carolyn Fiddler likes to call it “the Trump effect”—the sudden surge of new candidates, most of them women, who said to themselves: If that fucking schlub can be president, I can run for office. Fiddler, an expert on Virginia politics, is partly kidding—but partly not. For a host of reasons, the election of the pussy-grabbing, utterly incompetent, nationally embarrassing Donald Trump has inspired a stunning wave of female newcomers to electoral politics. Since November, an astonishing 16,000 women have contacted Emily’s List, which works to elect pro-choice Democratic women, to say they want to run. In the 2015–16 election cycle, only 920 women did that.

In answer to the first woman on a national ticket America elected the most overtly misogynist, incompetent cretin to ever sit in the Oval Office. It's infuriating. But some women are reacting to that insult by running for office and good for them.